In between updates to Agile Web Development with Rails 7, I keep my Rails skills sharp by developing small applications.
I also take ballroom dance lessons with my wife, and we have competed internationally and at smaller local competitions. For larger events there is commercial software for scheduling "heats" where dancers go on the floor and be judged. Smaller competitions use spreadsheets to track this.
Scheduling is deceptively hard, particularly if you have last minute changes such as an instructor not being able to make the competition for any reason. Manually making last minute changes can lead to scheduling mishaps, such as having the same person being scheduled twice with different partners for the same heat.
This application manages showcase events, from data entry to scheduling, to generating of printed reports. It can also be accessed by participants on the day of the event to see the list of heats, and by judges to enter scores.
git clone https://github.com/rubys/showcase.git
cd Showcase
bundle install
bin/rails db:prepare
bin/rails test
bin/rails test:system
bin/dev
Visit http://localhost:3000/ to see the event.
Prerequisites: git, ruby, and docker.
git clone https://github.com/rubys/showcase.git
cd Showcase
bundle install
rm config/credentials.yml.enc
bin/rails credentials:edit
$EDITOR config/tenant/showcases.yml
docker compose build
docker compose up
docker compose exec web bin/bootstrap
Visit http://localhost:9999/showcase/ to see the list of events.
This is pretty much a standard CRUD Rails 7 application using import maps for JavaScript and TailwindCSS for CSS.
Models are provided for people (judges, emcees, instructors, students, and guests), packages, options, ages, levels, studios, dances, categories, events, heats, solos, formations, multi-heats, and scores, as well as a special singleton table for event information and settings.
The heat scheduler can be found in app/controllers/concerns/heat_scheduler.rb. It collects heats by agenda category, schedules them in two passes (first pass minimizes the number of heats, the second pass balances heats size), interleaves dances of different types within an agenda category, then appends solos.
Order of solos within an agenda category is controlled entirely manually via drag and drop.
The initial configuration had a 8 year old i3 Linux box running Apache httpd handing SSL and reverse proxying the application to a 2021 vintage Mac Mini M1 running the nginx configuration described above. This approach could easily scale to be able to handle hundreds of events even with a half dozen or so running concurrently, but had a hard dependency on my house having both power and internet connectivity. As such a different architecture was needed. See ARCHITECTURE.md for more details.